Edwardian Turn Of Mind

Description

The Edwardian Turn of Mind brilliantly evokes the cultural temper of an age. The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters- Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors. His book is a portrait of a tumultuous time - out of which contemporary England was made.

Samuel Hynes was born in Chicago in 1924 and was educated at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. He has taught at Swarthmore College, Northwestern University and Princeton University. From 1943 to 1956, and again in 1952-3, he served as a pilot in the United States Marine Corps. His books include The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry, Edwardian Occasions and Flights of Passage- Reflections of a World War II Aviator. The Edwardian Turn of Mind is the first volume of Samuel Hynes's trilogy of cultural histories covering the relationship between literature, theatre and public events during the first decades of the twentieth century. The others - A War Imagined and The Auden Generation - are also published by Pimlico.

Professor Hynes's book deserves to be set alongside the long-standing masterpiece on the latter part of the same period, George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England... It is done so ruthlessly well that Edwardian England will never recover its air of golden repose before the deluge. -- Michael Foot * Evening Standard * Original and important.. It is a most impressive survey and succeeds in bringing coherent conceptual organization to a formidable mass of material. -- Steven Marcus * Atlantic Monthly * This is a delightful book... often witty in its turn of phrase and often original in its own turn of mind. -- Marghanita Laski * Saturday Review * An excellent account of the origins of our present intellectual and moral climate -- Malcolm Muggeridge * Observer * There will be many more studies of the age. But few of them are likely to be so well-constructed and compulsively readable as The Edwardian Turn of Mind -- Michael Holroyd * New York Times Book Review *